Passive agressive lawncare

Our neighbor Bill's yard basically surrounds ours on two sides like an L. He's a terrific neighbor but this year he's been really outdoing me in the lawn mowing department. A lot of it is timing, remember that trip to Asia which actually came right on the heels of a week in Burbank. Also Angie has had terrible trouble with our lawnmowers. Twice now I've been on trips and she's been unable to start the Snapper and once she ran the Cub Cadet out of gas and was unable to get it to re-start once it was refueled.

So I was delighted yesterday to mow our lawn BEFORE Bill got a chance to mow his. I'd been debating if it needed mowing for a couple days, in the depths of summer like this it requires mowing less often.

Clearly it needed it, I was taking off almost 4 inches.

The tool for the job was my 1965 Snapper 308X, I looked back in the blog and realized I'd hauled it home back in 2008 which I think means I got it running in 2009. Its still got one original '60s vintage tire, the engine is from an '88 model, I replaced the belt, drive wheel and blade when I first started using it back in '09 and in fact the blade and drive wheel are probably due for replacement again, reverse is a little iffy. Otherwise this thing has been OUTSTANDING. I've done very little to it for 6 years of regular use. For me it always starts on the first or second pull of the rope and cuts all the grass on our quarter acre on less than a quart of gas. Once in awhile it throws the belt but thats really the worst that happens other than the time the last original front tire came apart while I was mowing. I finished mowing the lawn rolling on the tube which didn't steer very well...

Uh oh, I might be a lampie!

A collector of lamps that is. This is the enclosed porch on our house, they all Coleman here, right to left we've got a 117a, CQ, 152 and a BQ.
Now that I look at it I think the 117a actually has a CQ burner, its fitted with an R55 generator which doesn't make sense, the 117a had the new roto type burner assembly that used a 220 type generator with built in pricker. The 117 had a slant burner assembly that could potentially have sported an R55 generator but not in the orientation this one has.

The BQ is probably a little bent, the shade tips way forward in the picture and at first I thought it was just that the hook is too far from the wall, which it is, but no even with the base tipped out the shade still tips way forward. Theres a solder joint at the fount where somebody has obviously repaired a leak of some sort so I'm hesitant to mess with the tube since the lamp does burn nicely.

I just finished the CQ today, I'd pulled the burner a couple weeks ago to clean it and managed to bust the stud that holds the shade holder to the burner. I got a replacement burner from a nice guy on Facebook, then drilled and tapped the nut that holds it on. I cut the head off a 10-32 screw to use as a stud and it works fine. It burned good before I started, I should have left well enough alone.

Not in the picture is the Kerosafe lamp which started all this obsession or my other BQ which is on the bench now as my next project. It passes air through the R55 generator so I don't think it will take much to get it running. I want to polish up the nickel before I go too far getting it going.

Garden of wonder

I don't think I've talked about gardening before. We keep a couple gardens, in front of the house I've got an asparagus patch with some potato plants growing in textile pots (more on them next time) and in the backyard I've got a little patch of vegetables:

Theres 2x 3'x5' beds with a dry laid brick walkway up the middle. Lets look at the right side first.
In front theres a tomato plant, I don't remember the variety since I don't eat tomatoes but its grows grape size tomatoes that Angie likes

The tomatoes are formed but haven't started to turn red yet, we're getting some warmer weather lately so I expect these will ripen pretty soon. Behind the tomatoes we've got some basil, lady bell peppers and lettuce I didn't get pictures of. At the rear of the right side we've got cucumbers, by accident we ended up with 8 cucumber plants so pretty soon we're going to be swimming in cucumbers. Cucumbers take a lot of space if you let them grow along the ground so this year I'm training them up poles. What started as an experiment with one plant has now become most of them:

I was a little dubious of the idea at first but I'm sold now, I've been using baling twine to attach them to some sticks I pulled out of the woods and we're finally starting to see cucumbers. The other nice thing is that the cucumbers are easy to find and pick with this method. I've also been careful to cut all the suckers the vines produce which is supposed to force them into more useful growth rather than trying to strangle each other.

Back on the left side of the garden we've got kale:

Oh boy do we have kale! Last year our garden sucked due to some weak fertilizer that I under applied and about the only thing we got was kale. We had 4 plants last year which produced about one meal of kale a week. This year we've got 6 plants which produce about a meal every other day which is a problem as we're both already tired of kale...

Behind the kale and in constant danger of being taken over is the swiss chard

Its also doing real well, producing a meal every 3rd day or so. If I had a preference I'd rather get more chard and less kale but what are you gonna do? Just to the left in the picture you can see the butter crisp lettuce. I like this lettuce because it doesn't head so when we want some I just go cut some of the outer leaves off. This should give us lettuce all summer.

Behind the lettuce and chard is the bean trellis,

The frame is 3 pieces of fencing in a triangle shape. The picture is a few days old and the plants have gone crazy in the meantime, you can barely see any of the horizontal strings anymore. I expect we'll start getting beans soon. These should be Kentucky Wonder yellow wax beans and if the bean production meets the vine production standard we should have a ton of them.

Once the beans get rolling we'll freeze a bunch of them for the winter. In 2012 we froze a bunch of fiddleheads with Ziplock brand vacuum freezer bags that worked out really well so we'll try those again. Sadly it looks like our local stores don't stock the bags anymore but fortunately Amazon has them. I was momentarily tempted to buy a Foodsaver but we really don't freeze enough to warrant it and I hate having extra junk around the house that we don't use a lot.

4th of July fun

I wanted to have a big light up for Independence day, I don't do fireworks so this was my way of celebrating.

As I lit the Tilleys I had an idea, I'd recreate the Revolution in lanterns:

Beginning with the British Overlords

A small American contingent arrives, the Limeys are not amused.

An injured American soldier

The surgeon is German, his work is excellent!

American artillery arrives, the Brits begin to fear

An encircling maneuver begins

The charge of the Turd brigade

Faced with an overwhelming force the British retreat

In the end I had 26 lanterns lit making this the biggest light up I've ever had. This is something under half the lanterns I own although a large proportion of the lanterns I consider light-able. After lighting we cooked some popcorn on my Optimus Hiker stove and enjoyed some Mt Gay "Extra Old" rum we'd brought back from Barbados. That rum is smooth and drinks more like bourbon than rum which isn't terribly surprising considering its aged in bourbon barrels.

I should also point out that this was the number of lanterns I could light without adding fuel although I did refuel the Vapalux from the British contingent at one point. One of my goals in this project was to run some of these lanterns out of fuel which actually worked out pretty well, we had several dead soldiers by the end of the evening.

ICCC Convention 2015!

Yup, another International Coleman Collectors Club convention, this year in Walnut Creek, Ohio. This is Amish country, hilly, south central Ohio. Its a strange land I tell you, the roads are narrow, they twist around, they're full of Amish folk in buggies and the speed limit is 55mph!

As always the convention was interesting but the camp ground was where its at. A couple quick shots:

Ryan warming water for the ladies. Thats his Peak 1 stove but my Optimus hiking pot and pickup. That pot got worked a lot over the weekend and is terrific, actually the combo of Peak 1 and Optimus pot work really well together and boil water super quick.

Bugs love to find their way into lanterns and die.

This is the second of two light ups, I don't remember why but we couldn't get our act together to make it to the first one. The layout looks weird from this angle but the other way up it would be a kero-lite lantern. There weren't all that many lanterns, maybe 50-60 but I didn't count or hear a number.

The light up was at the convention hotel which made for good viewing stations.

For me this was the big deal of the whole convention. Greg had this hollow wire setup with 5 or 6 lamp heads attached to it all running off one tank. Back around the turn of the 20th century these hollow wire systems would be in people's houses with 1/8" copper tubes running through the walls of the house. The thing is that the fixtures are all torch-lite so you'd have to preheat the fixture to get it lit, if you didn't preheat enough or the generator was dirty or whatever you'd have burning balls of gasoline falling on the floor of your house. Sounds exciting right?

The last and probably most important piece of news is that after a close vote Angie and I were chosen to host the 2017 ICCC convention here in Winchendon, MA. In the weeks since the convention I've been scrambling to lock down a location, we're still kind of up in the air about that for now, I'll let you know when I've got something firmed up. Right now it looks like we'll be sending campers to Lake Dennison and Otter River state parks and hotel folks to the Colonial Hotel in Gardner, MA or the Woodbound Inn in Rindge, NH. Not sure yet which will be the better hotel, it depends on where the convention actually ends up, as I say I'll let you know when I know.

Wrapping up the Asia trip

After I got sick the rest of my trip was basically about surviving, I went to work, went back to the hotel and slept, then repeat. The worst was that the housekeeping people insisted on cleaning the room after noon each day despite my asking them to take care of it earlier. If I left the "do not disturb" card up all day they'd call around 4pm to see if I was okay and wanted the room cleaned. This waking up at 4 to answer the phone was hard on my sleep schedule.

One thing I really want to comment on was my experience leaving Manila. Remembering that I travel a lot I was very impressed with the whole experience. Upon arrival at the airport I went through a metal detector and my stuff through an x-ray. I was immediately met by a JAL representative who took me to the ticketing counter and handed me off to a nice lady who offered to switch me to an aisle seat instead of my window seat on the Japan to Boston flight. She then handed me off to another nice lady who took me over to the security line.

This is where I realized I should have been taking more pictures...

The whole process of leaving the Philippines was pretty easy, no big deal. I got a massage while I waited for my flight. A very small Filipino woman broke me on a very low table, it took days for the soreness to pass. I did feel quite flexible on the flight though...

In Tokyo I found this:

Its nice when the airport has something to look at while I'm waiting.
Actually Japan is really good for that,

The pink stuff on the left is picked ginger, the stuff on the right is somewhat like cucumbers, so basically normal pickles.

Yeah, its juvenile but I couldn't avoid a taking picture of Pocari Sweat. Its a sports drink like Gatoraide, it shows up pre-mixed in bottles too...

I bought a bunch of snacks to bring home but also:

This little beauty is a single use ice cream cone, the machine takes a little cup and makes one ice cream out of it rather than the ice cream machines here which process ice cream in bulk. It was a very good ice cream, very smooth and creamy. Cheap too, it was around 300 Yen so with the Yen at 127 to the dollar it was under $3, for airport ice cream thats basically free.

Heres the haul of foods I brought back from asia, Ding Dong is snack mix, peanuts, peas and little crackers. Theres 6 kinds of Kit Kat, Giant Pocky the size of pretzel sticks, almond crusted pocky, 4 kinds of dried mango, chocolate covered pretzels, chocolate covered marshmallow, graham pinnapigs which are weird chocolate covered graham things and other stuff I don't even remember. So far my favorite is the giant Pocky, all the good from Pocky in a larger size...

Ramen!

I mentioned in my previous post that I lived on ramen and oatmeal and that the Ramen in the Philippines was really good, here's a couple examples:

Here I wanted you to see that this ramen came with both a spice packet and an oil/soy sauce packet. The oil is what really adds to the taste of the noodles, here's another:

This one dispenses with the oil and gives a packet of FAT. I don't know what the fat is but its very tasty and makes for a ramen more like what you'd get in a restaurant.

Theres also this:

I was super surprised when my ramen came with a little fork but it makes good sense, if you're eating on the go you probably haven't brought utensils. The 7-11 I bought my ramen from had spoons available but I found that my willingness to slurp the broth plus the little fork got me where I needed to be, which is to say it got that tasty noodle goodness in my mouth and headed on down...